Ginny Robinson apparently didn't get the memo.
That's understandable, since Robinson wasn't born when mathematician and musician Tom Lehrer declared satire dead. That form of humor and social criticism expired, according to Lehrer, when Henry Kissenger received the Nobel Peace Prize. Ironically, Robinson's Cavalier Daily column ("The new American patriotism," Oct. 14) concerned the most recent Peace Prize winner, Barack Obama. In these early months of the Obama administration, Robinson wrote, "A new spirit of patriotism is exactly what America needs. Forget the old, archaic model of American patriotism characterized by two-way dialogue and citizen dissent. In the new spirit of patriotism there simply is no room for political disagreement."
Unfortunately, it seems that many people did not see that Robinson typed with her tongue firmly in her cheek.
This isn't the first time this sort of thing has happened. The July 21, 2008 cover of The New Yorker may forever live in infamy. The cover art showed Barack and Michelle Obama in the Oval Office. She wore camouflage pants and an Angela Davis-style Afro. The bandolier slung over her shoulder like a beauty contestant's sash doubled as a sling for the AK47 on her back. The then-candidate for president wore an outfit that would have looked at home in Osama Ben Ladin's inner circle. A portrait of the Al-Qaeda leader George W. Bush once promised to bring back dead or alive hung above a fireplace wherein a Star Spangled Banner was burning.
The future first couple stood on the presidential seal, performing what Fox News famously labeled a "terrorist fist bump."
The title of the artwork, "The Politics of Fear," should have given a clue to the artist's intent. But the title was inside the magazine, and people had already seen and judged the art before they knew what it was called. An allusion to the Obama campaign's "politics of hope," it aimed to satirize the fictionalized portions of the campaign against Obama, those portions aimed not at our better angels, but at our baser instincts.
A lot of people didn't get it. And a lot of people who understood the artist's intention thought the satire just didn't work. It was too literal a translation of what the whacko fringe and its fellow travelers were actually saying. Which was kind of Lehrer's point, I think.
When political opponents accuse the president of being a communist-socialist-fascist bent of denying health care to old people and Republicans; when a former Republican governor who was also a vice presidential candidate goes to what Republicans used to call Communist China and denounces the president and his policies in a speech from which she excludes the press - well, there's just not a lot of room above that for anyone who wants to go over the top.
There may have been a time when presenting a presidential candidate and his wife as a Manchurian candidate and his radical accomplice would have been so clearly hyperbolic that it would have been understood as a clearly satirical jab at the political wing nuts America has usually tolerated and only occasionally followed. If such a time ever existed, we do not live in that time.
This is not completely new ground for American politics, of course. When Mr. Jefferson ran for president, his opponents warned voters that the many horrors certain to come to pass during the Virginian's administration would include their wives and daughters being forced into prostitution.
Many years after Jefferson's administration, a small town in the Shenandoah Valley was having what its elected officials considered a terrible problem with feral cats. While the debate raged among cat haters and animal lovers and would-be cat regulators, someone wrote a letter to the editor of a neighboring city's newspaper suggesting that the simplest, most effective fix would be to add cats to the list of animals that may be legally hunted. The writer even offered recipes that would turn the problem into delicious, nutritious meals. For reasons that aren't all that clear to me now, I thought it was a hilarious bit of satire. I printed it.
I told one of the hundreds of angry and appalled people who wrote and called that the letter was satire, like Jonathan Swift's modest proposal that the solution to Irish hunger was for the Irish to eat their babies. He didn't mean it literally, I said. Swift was using hyperbole to make a point.
I could almost hear the veins behind the ear at the other end of the phone line explode before that caller demanded to know who this Swift fellow was and what could be done assure that someone put that madman under lock and key.
Perhaps satire is dead, but it clearly retains the power to singe its users as well as their targets. Any would be satirist should keep that in mind.
Tim Thornton is The Cavalier Daily's ombudsman. His columns usually appear on Mondays.
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